annielausier.com » design

Visualizing Tax Freedom Day

annie — Sat, 18 Apr 2009 20:11:18 +0000

Over at FlowingData is a Visualize This challenge to visualize Tax Freedom Day (the number of days that your taxes take out of your yearly income). The national average is 103 days out of the 365, or April 13th. The average varies from state to state and the task is to represent these state statistics.

My first inclination was to incorporate a map, with possibly a topographic-type extrusion of each state for the length of time. But in order to do that really well, it would take some interactive 3D navigation…and I haven’t touched Processing in a long time. Or Flash for that matter.

Next I thought about some kind of chart, so I played around with YUI charts. Nothing I came up with was very compelling though, so I decided to approach it from the calendar view. I ended up with this HTML/JS visualization: Tax Freedom Dates & States.

It seems to me that people will want to browse by state or browse chronologically, so here you can get the states from hovering over a (green) date in the calendar view or get the date by hovering over a state. The national average (April 13th) is represented by a brighter green date. I thought about incorporating color gradations, but I like the simplicity of one color for tax days. Also, I made it from scratch with the goal just to make it work, so it could probably be more efficient.

Blue FamFamFam Stars for Wordpress Blog Ratings

annie — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 03:00:16 +0000

Man, it’s been a while since I’ve posted. Anyways, I’ve been playing around with changing one of my Wordpress sites’ themes using the Theme Test Drive plugin and I like one of the most popular themes I found, iNove. I currently have ratings on this particular site (I use the WP-PostRatings plugin). I think the plugin already uses FamFamFam icons for the stars, but I want to use blue ones to match the comment icons in the iNove PostInfo section. Here’s a screenshot of how the ratings stars will look with the text and comment icon:

Here’s how to use these blue ratings stars in your blog:

1. Install the WP-PostRatings plugin and set it up in your blog (activate it, put the php in your posts, etc).

2. Download this zip file, extract it, and place the stars_blue folder in your blog’s wp-content/plugins/postratings/images directory.

3. Go to the Ratings tab and select the Ratings Options page. Then select the stars_blue radio button. Double-check how it will look by hitting “Update ‘Individual Rating Text/Value’ Display” and then hit Update Options to save.

The yellow is the color that will appear when a user is rating a post while the blue indicates the current cumulative rating of the post.

Yahoo! Stencil Kit – Out Now!

annie — Sun, 25 May 2008 20:25:14 +0000

Some great designers at Yahoo! have publicly released a Stencil Kit! It was released internally a few weeks ago and has made it much easier for me to wireframe. The designs are very clean and crisp. Go ahead and check it out – it’s available for OmniGraffle, Visio, Illustrator, and Photoshop!

Here are some examples in OmniGraffle:

Hello world!

annie — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 03:59:03 +0000

Hi! I’m Annie. I figured it’s about time I put my thoughts about design and technology somewhere concrete. And what better place than annielausier.com? :) I’m sure I’ll be writing a good bit soon.

Tonight was about getting WordPress set up and finding a nice theme. I liked the simplicity and design of Green Love over at BlogOhBlog. I wasn’t too keen on the dark so I lightened it up.

My portfolio site is located here until I integrate it into my new site. Here is the blog I kept in grad school if you’d like to take a look.